A recent article in The Chronicle of Higher Ed focused on the teaching of GRIT, a concept that emerged from research and personal experience of Dr. Angela Duckworth. Grit focuses on passion and perseverance as a way to help students persist and complete. The article writer (Dr. David DeSteno) notes "The way people usually solve such dilemmas — accepting sacrifices in the present in order to reach future goals — is with self-control. It’s no wonder, then, that colleges have placed great emphasis on teaching students better self-control. But the strategies that educators are recommending to build that self-control — a reliance on willpower and executive function to suppress emotions and desires for immediate pleasures — are precisely the wrong ones. Besides having a poor long-term success rate in general, the effectiveness of willpower drops precipitously when people are feeling tired, anxious, or stressed. And, unfortunately, that is exactly how many of today’s students often find themselves." He goes on to suggest that "strong interpersonal relationships were necessary to thrive. But to be identified as a good partner, a person had to be trustworthy, generous, fair, and diligent." Are those traits teachable? We can certainly talk about how someone who is fair or generous acts. We may be able to teach skills that support diligence. Trustworthiness can be modeled in the hopes that the student sees the value in attaining this trait. Creating learning experiences that allow students to practice these set of traits will take some time to develop. What do you think?

We are regularly told that if we can just make our classes more exciting, our students would be motivated to learn. While I have found that to be true, I have also come to believe that using self-motivation and critical self-reflection is vital for any student to really become what I would call a super learner. This type of person wants to learn about new things because they understand that it enhances their quality of life. While they do want to get a great job (don't we all?) they know that hard work pays off and that learning for the sake of being a better informed person can be motivation enough. As I was going through my bookmark list, I found an article from 2013 that validates my observations. “Boring but Important: A Self-Transcendent Purpose for Learning Fosters Academic Self-Regulation”, is a paper that was published based on research by David S. Yeager, Marlone D. Henderson, Sidney D’Mello, David Paunesku, Gregory M. Walton, Brian J. Spitzer, and Angela Lee Duckworth. They write, “Many important learning tasks feel uninteresting and tedious to learners. This research proposed that promoting a pro-social, self-transcendent purpose could improve academic self-regulation on such tasks. Results showed that a self-transcendent purpose for learning increased the tendency to attempt to deeply learn from the tedious academic task.” Because their research was very extensive and actually included four studies, I strongly encourage you dive into the article here.